Wealth of Wisdom

CHAPTER 16Developing a Family Wealth Education Plan

Kirby Rosplock

This chapter shares best practices and steps to build a family wealth education plan by first assessing and defining wealth education, developing a template, and assessing the challenges and process for implementing a family wealth education framework.

Defining Family Wealth Education

The first step is understanding a family's definition of wealth education. Wealth education may be defined as the “education, instruction, preparation and engagement of family members on the responsibilities of being an owner, inheritor, beneficiary, steward, fiduciary or other party to the wealth.”¹ However, the process to craft a wealth education framework for a family is bespoke and requires engagement of family members at different ages and stages.

Most families start informally, with financial parenting, and using real-life experiences from shopping to banking as experiential opportunities to teach.² The early years of financial fluency training focuses primarily on financial awareness and money skills such as counting coins and bills, making change, evaluating potential purchases, bartering and trading, understanding the purpose of money, earning money, and creating small startups. Developing habits around saving, spending, investing, and giving may be followed by understanding cash needs, budgeting, and planning for purchases, impact investing, and understanding the differences between lifestyle and discretionary spending. ...